Being 'in the pink' is not good news for Windows
Azure, as this screenshot from the Windows Azure
Service Dashboard attests (click to enlarge)

The problems were first reported by Microsoft on Friday at 12:44pm Pacific Time on the Windows Azure Service Dashboard. An update at 1:30pm identified a problem with SSL transactions.

The company reported worldwide problems with Storage, with every sub-region reporting service degradation.

It looks like Microsoft made the basic error of letting its HTTPS certificate for Azure Storage expire, according to a post on the MSDN forum.

The fault appears to be affecting both blob and table storage.

Users of the Microsoft forums reacted with fury at the apparent schoolboy error.

"This is unacceptable, I'm supposed to release an enterprise app on this platform?" poster MJFara wrote.

The storage problems follow repeated glitches with Azure compute in both Asia and America over the past couple of days, and come on the heels of a week-long outage for SQL Reporting.

At the time of writing Microsoft had not responded to questions from the Vulture

It is the opinion of The Register that to have a core service fail in every data center across the world simultaneously is an extremely bad thing to happen to a cloud provider.

Update: 3pm

It appears that Azure is in the grip of a global cascading fail.

The storage problems have severely impacted other key components of the Azure cloud, including some of the services Microsoft has previously used to differentiate itself from arch-rival Amazon Web services.

The Windows Azure Service Bus, which helps pass information between different parts of the megacloud; Azure Web Sites, which offers easy-peasy hosting; Access Control 2.0; and the windowsazure.com website itself have all been hit by “service degradation.”

Compute has also been affected, with virtual machine deployment taking a tumble, though core compute remains viable.

There are anecdotal reports on Twitter that some components of XBOX Live have failed, as well.

Microsoft is frantically working to fix the problems.

"We are currently validating the repair steps in our test environment," Microsoft wrote at 2:15pm, Pacific time.

Update: 5:52pm

Microsoft has started recovery on "some" of the impacted storage clusters, Redmond wrote in an update to the Status Dashboard at 4:15pm PST.

The company said this could take a few hours and it was "validating faster recovery options."

A further update is promised within two hours, but given the scale of the outage The Register thinks the lights will be burning well past midnight in Redmond tonight. ®